Opinion Piece

West Africa’s single currency project has been declared dead more times than it has been declared alive. After five postponements spanning more than two decades, scepticism about the ECO is both understandable and, this piece argues, increasingly misplaced. The convergence challenges are real, manifesting in persistently high inflation in the WAMZ economies, unresolved questions about exchange rate regimes, and the structural fault line between the francophone CFA bloc and the anglophone WAMZ zone. But they are not insurmountable. This opinion piece maps the accelerating institutional momentum behind the July 2027 target, from the February 2026 Monrovia meeting of ECOWAS Central Bank Governors to Nigeria’s landmark appointment to the Board of the African Monetary Institute (AMI) at the AU’s 39th Ordinary Session. It reiterates that the phased approach, beginning with the six WAMZ countries, carries avoidable risks, and that the UEMOA bloc, already harmonised and convergent under decades of shared monetary discipline, offers a more credible and strategically sound first phase. The ECO is not merely a currency; it is the most consequential instrument of African economic sovereignty in a generation. The moment demands it.